Category: Edgerank

As the weather starts to cool down, digital marketers’ brains just begin to warm up and think about the budget for the New Year. The million-dollar question is what are the best digital networks to invest into and what platforms should receive more exposure for 2015?

Malcolm X was quoted as saying, “The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.” If you are reading this article, you are likely a step ahead of the competition by staying sharp in news and trends in the online marketing field. By starting to think about the future of online marketing, you can plan out a successful 2015 year for your business while staying a step ahead of the competition.

The 15 step guideline for the perfect 2015 digital marketing strategy will provide you with a digital marketing blueprint for the upcoming year.

1. Get Started On Instagram

If you haven’t started an Instagram account for your business, what are you waiting for? The younger generation has flocked to this social media platform with over 200 million monthly active users, according to Expanded Ramblings. Advertisers are getting more of an opportunity to share their content through filtered photos. Instagram is one of the most natural ways to share content for your brand. It is better to be a step ahead of the game than 2 steps behind it.

2. Yahoo! Bing Network

The average cost per click on Yahoo! Bing was 10% to 24% lower than on Google AdWords. A lower cost per click can yield a lower cost per acquisition, which is the exact reason why you should start taking the search network seriously that receives 11.6% of the market share this upcoming year.

If you are in an expensive industry in the pay per click world like the legal profession, insurance industry, or medical field, having a lower cost per click can help with a profitable PPC campaign.

3. Facebook Lookalike Audience

What exactly is a Facebook Lookalike Audience? According to Facebook, Lookalike audiences let you reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to a customer list you care about. When you use Custom Audiences, you can choose to create a lookalike audience that targets people who are similar to your Custom Audience list.

Let’s say you have an email marketing database over 5,000 contacts and are in the heating and cooling industry. You can upload this onto Facebook’s advertising platform and target the EXACT demographic similar to your existing customers! This is a neat feature that advertisers should at least test during the upcoming year.

4. Paid promotion On Facebook

Adding just $5.00 in promotion to selected Facebook posts will drastically increase your interaction. You’ll start to notice a major spike in communication when you boost your post for a small budget. With Facebook’s Edgerank Algorithm, the likelihood for a business to appear high in the news feed is less likely. This is why for 2015, you should focus on posts that can yield the best results and boost them for a small budget.

5. Email Marketing

If you are a business that only sends out one email blast per month, start doubling this number and send out at least two per month. Nordstrom sends out multiple email blasts EACH DAY! If you have compelling content that would be informative to the subscribers on your email list, tell them about it via email communications.

According to econsultancy.com, email marketing remains the best digital channel for ROI. Start strategizing heavily as to how you will make this for of online marketing work for you business in 2015!

6. Twitter Outreach

There has been a lot of frustration among marketers over all of the advertising that various social media channels are forcing businesses to partake in. Luckily, Twitter is still a great platform where you can grow your following organically. Start searching for hashtags within your industry and reaching out to users in this fashion. Compliment someone on Twitter about a blog post that they wrote. Begin asking questions related to your hashtag. The result will be more interaction and core following of people who are interested in your content! There is a reason why Twitter has nearly 1 billion registered users! Start reaching your target audience via tweets through the perfect Twitter outreach strategy in 2015.

7. Facebook Re-marketing

If you are a social media marketer and have not taken advantage of display advertising on Facebook, you are missing an outstanding opportunity. Not only will this yield one of the highest return on investments for your clients, it will help with brand exposure, lead to better conversion rates and provide a flexible budget which will lead to a more effective strategy.

An apartment community in Columbus implemented beautiful graphics with relevant messaging for one of its apartment communities for Facebook re-marketing. When someone would drop off of their website and visit Facebook, this messaging would follow them around. This resulted in a 33% uptick in conversion for their Polaris Apartments community!

Start seeing an uptick in conversion by implementing a Facebook re-marketing strategy for 2015.

8. Better Blogging

We like to refer to blog content as the match that starts the fire. When you write a compelling blog, it has the potential to rank well organically in the search engines. 80% of daily blog visits are new so this is a great driver of new website traffic! Additionally, a blog can serve as content for a Facebook and Twitter post as well as a teaser for an email marketing campaign. By creating better blog content in 2015, your web traffic will increase and your content will become more compelling

9. Google+ Game Plan

Google+ might not gain you that much interaction on your social media posts. This social media platform plays a crucial role in search engine optimization on the localized level, which makes this a must for marketers in 2015.

The more reviews you get, the more content you post onto your page and the more followers your obtain, the higher the likelihood that you will start ranking well for localized search terms.

10. YouTube Videos

Did you know that Google owns YouTube? By implementing videos into your online marketing mix, you can start to get search engine exposure for the videos that you upload onto YouTube! There are a lot of great tricks to obtain more video SEO Exposure. Choosing a proper title tag, uploading a transcript and embedding the YouTube video are just some of the tricks for optimal SEO exposure. Online video should definitely be included in your 2015 digital marketing strategy as this form of rich media can be a game changer in terms of publicity for your company. People will interpret your YouTube videos that you are taking your marketing initiatives very seriously!

11. Compelling Graphics

The more compelling your graphics are on various social media channels, the more interaction you will receive. If you have a graphic designer, start sending him or her over your social media calendar so they can help create beautiful imagery. In 2015 you will want to increase engagement and great pictures certainly help. If you don’t have a graphic designer, don’t worry; there are affordable sites that offer stock photography like BigStock.

12. Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) leads have an average close rate of 14.6%, while outbound leads (such as cold calls or print advertising) have an average close rate of 1.7%. Having your website optimized for SEO is a necessity heading into 2015. By having an SEO strategy in place, you can increase your leads and grow your business for next year.

13. Content Contribution

If you want your content to be seen by more eyeballs and gain more exposure, start contributing content to other blogs in similar fields. If you own an apartment community in Nashville, start writing for a local Nashville website that talks about the best activities around town. You will be seen as an expert in your city and this can help drive more traffic to your website. While people might not be looking for an apartment immediately, they will remember that you have invested time and effort into content within the community!

14. Digital PR

You can build off of the content contribution by implementing a Digital PR strategy. If you reach out to various media related websites and send them over a solid pitch, they might just write an article on your company or feature your CEO in a blog post. The more people talking about your company, Tweeting about your business and mentioning your brand, the better exposure you will receive for the upcoming year.

15. Unique Promotion

Brainstorm a unique promotion that people will actually enjoy that can drive massive publicity for your company in 2015! Whether it is coming up with a user generated jingle contest or a photo upload promotion, entice your great fans on social media to interact with your brand in a clever way. If the promotion is a success, it will be one of the most talked about campaigns for your company in 2015.

We don’t expect digital marketers to hit on each and every one of the 15 guidelines referenced above. Within the list, some of the suggestions are relatively new while others have been around for the past decade. If you incorporate some of the 15 Steps from our Guideline, you might just have the perfect year in 2015 from an online marketing perspective!

You’re a recruiter and you’re trying to use Facebook for job postings. Let’s say your Facebook Page has 1,000 fans and you do an update about a really hot opportunity. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, meaning you have a potential reach of 130,000 users right? Wrong.

The average Facebook post only reaches 16% of the page’s fans and most fans never go back to the Page after they have liked it in the first place. The average user has no less than 130 friends and 80 Pages, groups and events to keep track of. This means some serious filtering has to be done to ensure a decent user experience.

Enter EdgeRank, Facebook’s algorithm for deciding what you will see in your newsfeed. This formula is based on 3 ingredients: Affinity, Weight and Time Decay.

Facebook late Friday announced yet another push to reduce the number of organic brand posts it says are cluttering its users’ newsfeeds. In an update to its “volume and content controls for promotional posts” taking effect in January 2015, Facebook said it will further limit the number of promotions posted organically by brands to the users who liked them.

Facebook did not disclose the magnitude of the new controls, but said they would affect organic posts that “feel too promotional,” and cited three specific criteria:

1 – Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app.

2 – Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context.

3 – Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads.

The move likely will come as a blow to brands that have invested heavily in promoting their Facebook presence to consumers in an effort to get them to like them and to follow their brand content newsfeeds. Already industry executives had been monitoring the percentage of organic brand posts passing through Facebook’s so-called EdgeRank algorithm, a mathematical formula that helps Facebook determine how many and what kind of posts to come through users’ newsfeeds.

Facebook utilizes the algorithm to ensure that users are not overwhelmed with extraneous clutter from irrelevant or marginal posts, but executives who have been monitoring the performance of the algorithm have said in recent months it had fallen to low single-digit percentage reach for brands posting to Facebook users following or liking them.

Those moves, as well as the new update are likely to be a boon for Facebook — forcing many brands to shift from organic to paid strategies — because the only way for them to effectively reach consumers on Facebook will be through advertising. But even that is heavily gated by Facebook.

Facebook said the update is being made in response to research it conducted among its users, which it described as “part of an ongoing survey” involving “hundreds of thousands of people.”

Facebook did not disclose explicit guidelines for what constitutes overly promotional posts, but showed two examples (the Tiger Therapy one above and the Bunny Puzzle Cube one below) and warned that “pages that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time.”

As part of the announcement, Facebook also reminded brand marketers they can always utilize a paid option for reaching Facebook fans.
“For targeting specific audiences with predictable reach, Facebook advertising offers ways to achieve specific business objectives, like driving in-store sales or app downloads,” it said.

A smattering of comments posted by business users on the Facebook For Business news post were generally positive, but at least one raised an important question not just for business posters, but for business newsfeed readers.
“I follow a lot of local business pages for article shares and news,” commented Michael Parnell, manager at North Highland, adding: “Does this mean their articles won’t reach my news feed and I’ll now be forced to see even MORE pictures of babies and children from my friends, unless those businesses pay to reach me, even if I like them??”

We’ve seen a massive increase in Facebook Videos in the News Feed. Since Facebook has recently unveiled new metrics to help marketers understand how their videos are performing, we took a look at how people have been interacting with videos.

How long is a typical Facebook Video?

A typical video on Facebook is about 44 seconds long. This number should be taken with a grain of a salt, as there is quite a bit of variance around this figure. It’s interesting to note that the length is fairly short and, as such, we think Facebook’s News Feed is not the ideal place for long videos.

Do shorter videos perform better?

For this study, we chose to use completion as our measuring stick – Facebook provides robust metrics around video completion rates, so this makes it a thorough metric for our purposes, and most accurate. We found that videos that were less than ~21 seconds performed in the Top 25% for completion rates.

This finding is partially intuitive, as shorter videos are more likely to be watched to completion due to the fact there is less of a perceived investment on the viewer’s behalf. However, it’s important for marketers to understand that their audience will continually, potentially, be distracted away from your video, particularly if the content is not seen as being engaging enough to merit the exact time stated in the video length. Remember, streaming video is the only form of advertising where consumers are explicitly told how much time they will spend focused on the ad. Someone might spend more time looking through and sharing a rich-content image, but they know that a :30 video will ‘cost’ them only the time it takes to watch and share.

Videos that made up the Top 25% Completion Rate, were ~21 seconds long. As the videos were longer, their completion rate decreased.

How do people watch videos?

We assembled a graph to help better explain how the average Facebook user watches a video. As you can see below, the user retention rate plummets quickly. This is most likely users determining if the video is what they had expected to watch. As viewers settle into the video, the loss rate reduces (although a still fairly steady decrease), and accelerates as the user nears the end of the video.

Interestingly, Facebook counts a video “completed” if the user watches 95% of the video. Looking at the data, this is a smart choice, as the 2nd most severe drop-off occurs at the final 5%. It’s also makes sense due to credits/adver­tisements/etc at the end of videos.

How many people “complete” a video?

We found that ~57% of viewers who started watching a video, completed the video. According to the graph above, this data seems to add up. The data was fairly consistent, with only a 6% variance.

How does this retention rate compare to YouTube?

Although this is unconfirmed, we understand that Retention Rates on YouTube tend to hang around the ~40% mark. If this data holds true, Facebook Videos are outperforming YouTube videos. This increase in retention rate could be attributed to more intelligent distribution of videos on Facebook, due to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm doing a better job of matching up interested users with engaging videos than Youtube does.

How does a brand optimize for video?

Facebook is giving videos a ton of exposure in the News Feed right now. If your brand has the ability to produce high quality video content, we’d strongly suggest that you begin producing videos.

Create engaging content that will capture an audience beyond the first severe drop-off

If you have a call-to-action or something similar, be sure to include it sooner than later in your video. As every second goes by, there is a higher likelihood that your audience will bounce from your video.

Avoid putting all of your “business value” in a final credit slide. Even engaged users will most likely exit your video as it nears the end of the video.ConclusionFacebook is putting a lot of emphasis on video lately. Anecdotally, we’ve heard many general users mention an over abundance of videos in their News Feeds. Facebook is strongly pushing for ads on videos, which may be part of the reason we’re seeing an increase in recent success.

We encourage brands to try creating video content and testing how they perform with your own audience.

How did we study this data?

This is brand new data from Facebook. We examined as much data as we could pull from July 2014. This data is from roughly 1,000 pages that posted 3,000 videos. Viewer Retention data is directly from Facebook’s API converted from their intervals of 0–40 to the corresponding percentages.

The next time you tell a client how Facebook selects and ranks the content that shows up in the News Feed, you’ll need to do it without using the word EdgeRank.

EdgeRank, Facebook’s original News Feed ranking system, is dead.

Facebook hasn’t used the word internally for about two-and-a-half years. That’s when the company began employing a more complex ranking algorithm based on machine learning. The current News Feed algorithm doesn’t have a catchy name, but it’s clear from talking to the company’s engineers that EdgeRank is a thing of the past.

During a phone call this week, Lars Backstrom, Engineering Manager for News Feed Ranking at Facebook, estimated that there are as many as “100,000 individual weights in the model that produces News Feed.” The three original EdgeRank elements — Affinity, Weight and Time Decay — are still factors in News Feed ranking, but “other things are equally important,” he says.

In other words, the News Feed algorithm of today is much more sophisticated than just a couple years ago.

“The easiest analogy is to search engines and how they rank web pages,” Backstrom says. “It’s like comparing the Google of today with Alta Vista. Both Google and Bing have a lot of new signals, like personalization, that they use. It’s more sophisticated than the early days of search, when the words on a page were the most important thing.”

This has implications for marketers and business owners far beyond the wording used to describe News Feed rankings. It’s a reflection — and a cause, too — of today’s complex battle to reach Facebook users organically.

The winners? They’ll be the ones who understand how Facebook has moved past Affinity, Weight and Time Decay, and move past it themselves. Before we get into today’s News Feed algorithm, let’s go back a few years.

In The Beginning It Was … Turning Knobs
Facebook’s News Feed was born in September 2006, promising to provide … and I quote … “a personalized list of news stories throughout the day, so you’ll know when Mark adds Britney Spears to his Favorites or when your crush is single again.”

Yep, that’s a direct quote from the announcement. Cute, huh?

With the launch of News Feed, Facebook wanted to show users the most important content from their social network without making them click to visit their friends’ profiles. And it had to figure out a way to decide what was important to each person.

Cox gave a funny account of how he and a co-worker sat in Facebook’s offices and changed the ranking “knobs” based on feedback from users — feedback in the form of often angry emails and conversations with users outside the Facebook office.

Times were much simpler then.

From Knobs To EdgeRank
Facebook has obviously grown up a lot since then, particularly with the simultaneous launch of Facebook Ads and Pages in November 2007.

Businesses, clubs, and organizations began creating Facebook Pages and using them to try to reach existing and new fans. That meant more content and more chances for users’ News Feeds to get crowded and unwieldy.

The company advanced from “turning knobs” to EdgeRank, the algorithm that a) determined which of the thousands of stories (or “edges” as Facebook called them) qualified to show up in a user’s News Feed, and b) ranked them for display purposes. EdgeRank had three primary pieces:

Affinity — i.e., how close is the relationship between the user and the content/source?Weight — i.e., what type of action was taken on the content?Decay — i.e., how recent/current is the content?

EdgeRank made it possible for Facebook to give users a more personalized NewsFeed. As Cox explained, users that played a lot of games on Facebook could see more game-related content in their News Feed. Users that took part in a lot of Group discussions would see more content like that. And so forth.

From EdgeRank To… ?
With EdgeRank, the way you used Facebook largely determined what showed up in your News Feed. And it still does because, as Cox said last week, “We’re in the business of giving our users the most interesting possible experience every time they visit.”

But now that job is a lot more complicated than ever.

Consider that there are more than a billion people using Facebook each month. And 128 million in the U.S. that use Facebook every day. They’re using dozens of different mobile devices with different capabilities for displaying content. There are 18 million Pages, many of which are actively looking for attention and a way to show up the News Feed as often as possible. And that number doesn’t include the numerous businesses that are using Facebook via regular accounts rather than Pages.

With all of that going on, Facebook says that the typical user has about 1,500 stories that could show in the News Feed on every visit.

So how does Facebook decide what users see, and what content from Facebook Pages make it into the News Feed? As you can imagine, Facebook isn’t about to give away all the details, but Backstrom did talk openly about several ways that the algorithm has grown up in recent years.

Affinity, Weight & Time Decay

These are “still important,” Backstrom says, but there are now multiple weight levels. “There are a lot of different facets. We have categories and sub-categories of affinity.”

Facebook is attempting to measure how close each user is to friends and Pages, but that measurement isn’t just based on personal interactions. Backstrom says Facebook looks at global interactions, too, and those can outweigh personal interactions if the signal is strong enough.

“For example, if we show an update to 100 users, but only a couple of them interact with it, we may not show it in your News Feed. But if a lot of people are interacting with it, we might decide to show it to you, too.”

Relationship Settings

Another factor is the relationship settings that Facebook users can apply. With each friend, you can go a step further and label the person a “close friend” or “acquaintance.” With liked Pages, users can choose to “Get notifications” or “Receive updates,” and there are deeper settings to control what kind of content the user wants to see.

“We try to extract affinity naturally,” Backstrom says, “but if you go to the trouble to tell us more about your relationships, we will factor that in.”

Post Types

The News Feed algorithm takes into account the type of posts that each user tends to like. Users that often interact with photo posts are more likely to see more photo posts in the News Feed, and users that tend to click more on links will see more posts with links.

Backstrom says this is also applied on a deeper level. “It’s not just about global interactions. We also look at what types of posts you interact with the most from each friend.”

In other words, Facebook Page owners that continually publish one type of post are likely not having those posts seen by fans that interact with other types of posts.

Hide Post / Spam Reporting

News Feed visibility can also be impacted by users’ ability to hide posts or mark them as spam. But it’s not as simple as having a set threshold that will cause posts to stop showing in users’ News Feeds.

“For every story, we do the same computation,” Backstrom explains. “Given this story, and given the user’s history, what’s the probability that you’ll like this story? What’s the probably that you’ll hide it? We’re looking at this and trying to decide, is it a net positive to show this story in the News Feed?”

Further, Backstrom says there’s an element of decay when considering posts that have been hidden. Recent “hides” may carry more weight when deciding if a post shows in the News Feed, but those “hides” will have less impact as they decay over time.

Clicking On Ads, Viewing Other Timelines

The News Feed algorithm is completely separate from the algorithm that decides what ads to show, when to show ads, and where to show them. But how a user interacts with Facebook ads can influence what shows in the News Feed.

“Nothing is off the table when we’re looking at what we should show users,” Backstrom says. “It can be clicking on ads or looking at other timelines. It doesn’t have to be just what the user interacts with in the News Feed.”

Device & Technical Considerations

Yep, the News Feed algorithm even considers what device is being used and things like the speed of a user’s internet connection when deciding what to show.

“The technical limitations of some old feature phones make it impossible to show some content,” Backstrom. “We also know that some content doesn’t perform as well with Facebook users on certain devices. And if the user has a slow internet connection, we may show more text updates. We’re trying to show users content that they’ll find interesting and want to interact with.”

Story Bumping & Last Actor

Don’t forget these two changes that Facebook just announced last week. Story Bumping bends the “decay” rules by giving older, unseen posts a second chance at News Feed visibility if they’re still getting interaction.

Last Actor puts a premium on recency. Facebook is tracking a user’s most recent 50 interactions and giving them more weight when deciding what to show in the News Feed. This works on a rolling basis, so the value of an interaction will decline after the user has made 50 more recent interactions.

Final Thoughts
It should be clear that Facebook’s News Feed algorithm has developed significantly over the past few years. EdgeRank is a thing of the past, and it’s been replaced by a machine learning-based algorithm that, as Backstrom says, “only ever gets more complicated.”

That poses new challenges for brands and marketers hoping to get attention on Facebook, but the company says its advice to Page owners and others is the same: Create and publish and a variety of interesting content that will attract shares, comments, likes and clicks. That requires understanding your Facebook fans — from the types of posts they interact with to the different devices they might be using when they’re on Facebook.

We’ll keep reporting on Facebook’s News Feed changes, and our contributing writers will keep sharing tips and advice, too. You might also keep an eye on the new Facebook for Business news page because the company has promised to be more open in the future about changes that affect how the News Feed works.

Understand Edgerank for facebook with neilw8man.com to get more from your facebook for business page. Knowing how it works can help you stand out from the crowd, understand how going viral can help you, why everyone tells you to engage with your audience.

The average Facebook user spends more than a quarter of his or her time on the site scrolling through the News Feed. For users, that means a lot of baby pictures and stale memes. For brands, it represents an opportunity.

See, Facebook brand pages don’t attract consumers — far from it. Virtually every fan of a brand, such as Coke, will never return to its page after an initial Like (if they even visited at all). So where’s the best place to reach that consumer?

You guessed it: News Feed. Brands are finally embracing social marketing in effective ways, but there’s still a lot to learn about the strategies of the medium and the algorithms that keep it running.

That’s where EdgeRank comes in. Whether you’re a brand or an average user, it’s helpful to understand what shows up in your News Feed and why.

Check out the infographic below, courtesy of Post Rocket, to educate yourself on EdgeRank.

For a presentation, I gathered some Facebook EdgeRank infographics and thought I should post them here as well.

Looking at this first moontoast.com infographic, I find their tiering of the fanbase interesting.

How difficult is it to segment and target fans who have actually purchased from you?

If you have Facebook Connect on your e-commerce site, that shouldn’t be much of a problem on the actual site, but is there a way to target them on Facebook. Maybe FanGager has such a function?

Here goes.

The Anatomy of a Fan

PostRocket is a nifty little service, kind of like Buffer but for Facebook with better image handling.

But the big question these days is how much third-party Facebook publishing apps are affected negatively by EdgeRank versus good old-fashioned manual postings?

Anyway, interesting with this infographic are that 96% of fans never visit the brand site twice.

We knew that the action took place on user’s walls and this seems to hold very true still.

Edgerank-101 Class is now open

If I were Batman, I would definitely spend more time keeping an eye on Bane.

How News Feed Stories are Filtered

In this infographic by topolilly.com, it’s interesting to discuss why Facebook treats video content with so little love.

After all, video content seems to be booming everywhere else.

Or is it simply because we don’t go to Facebook for video or that the interface just isn’t the right place for it?

Or do we just don’t like to share video on Facebook as much?

Interesting also that they say “links only if necessary”… well, 9 times out of 10, I’m more interested in driving traffic to a site that I can derive value from, rather than building engagement for Facebook, the company.

I’d rather have fewer people liking, commenting and sharing an URL that I actually control, than having them interact with “Facebook-only” content.

What is EdgeRank?

EdgeRank is the Facebook algorithm that decides which stories appear in each user’s newsfeed. The algorithm hides boring stories, so if your story doesn’t score well, no one will see it.

The first thing someone sees when they log into Facebook is the newsfeed. This is a summary of what’s been happening recently among their friends on Facebook.

Every action their friends take is a potential newsfeed story. Facebook calls these actions “Edges.” That means whenever a friend posts a status update, comments on another status update, tags a photo, joins a fan page, or RSVP’s to an event it generates an “Edge,” and a story about that Edge might show up in the user’s personal newsfeed.

It’d be completely overwhelming if the newsfeed showed all of the possible stories from your friends. So Facebook created an algorithm to predict how interesting each story will be to each user. Facebook calls this algorithm “EdgeRank” because it ranks the edges. Then they filter each user’s newsfeed to only show the top-ranked stories for that particular user.

Why should I care?

Because most of your Facebook fans never see your status updates.

Facebook looks at all possible stories and says “Which story has the highest EdgeRank score? Let’s show it at the top of the user’s newsfeed. Which one has the next highest score? Let’s show it next.” If EdgeRank predicts a particular user will find your status update boring, then your status update will never even be shown to that particular user.

Caveat: There actually appears to be two algorithms, although this has not been conclusively proven. The EdgeRank algorithm ranks stories, and a second algorithm sorts the newsfeed. This newsfeed algorithm includes a randomization element and a keyword aggregator. Zuckerberg mentioned in an interview with TechCrunch that Facebook users found it eery how well Facebook knew what they were interested in, so they started randomizing the newsfeed slightly.

Affinity Score

Affinity Score means how “connected” a particular user is to the Edge. For example, I’m friends with my brother on Facebook. In addition, I write frequently on his wall, and we have fifty mutual friends. I have a very high affinity score with my brother, so Facebook knows I’ll probably want to see his status updates.

Facebook calculates affinity score by looking at explicit actions that users take, and factoring in 1) the strength of the action, 2) how close the person who took the action was to you, and 3) how long ago they took the action.

Explicit actions include clicking, liking, commenting, tagging, sharing, and friending. Each of these interactions has a different weight that reflects the effort required for the action–more effort from the user demonstrates more interest in the content. Commenting on something is worth more than merely liking it, which is worth more than merely clicking on it. Passively viewing a status update in your newsfeed does not count toward affinity score unless you interact with it.

Affinity score measures not only my actions, but also my friends’ actions, and their friends’ actions. For example, if I commented on a fan page, it’s worth more than if my friend commented, which is worth more than if a friend of a friend commented. Not all friends’ actions are treated equally. If I click on someone’s status updates and write on their wall regularly, that person’s actions influence my affinity score significantly more than another friend who I tend to ignore.

Lastly, if I used to interact with someone a lot, but less so now, then their influence will start to wane. Technically, Facebook is just multiplying each action by 1/x, where x is the time since the action happened.

Affinity score is one-way. My brother has a different affinity score to me than I have to him. If I write on my brother’s wall, Facebook knows I care about my brother, but doesn’t know if my brother cares about me.

This may sound confusing, but it’s mostly common sense.

Edge Weight

Each category of edges has a different default weight. In plain English, this means that comments are worth more than likes.

Every action that a user takes creates an edge, and each of those edges, except for clicks, creates a potential story. By default, you are more likely to see a story in your newsfeed about me commenting on a fan page than a story about me liking a fan page.

Facebook changes the edge weights to reflect which type of stories they think user will find most engaging. For example, photos and videos have a higher weight than links. Conceivably, this could be adjusted on a per-user level–if Sam tends to comment on photos, and Michelle comments on links, then Sam will have a higher Edge weight for photos and Michelle will have a higher Edge weight for links. It’s not clear if Facebook does this or not.

As a sidenote, Facebook may actually rank the act of commenting, liking, visiting a fan page, or even fanning a page differently depending on the source. For example, becoming a fan via an ad may have a lower Edge score than becoming a fan by searching for the fan page and then becoming a fan. This makes intuitive sense–the one user is hunting for the page and generally will care more about page stories than someone who had an ad thrust in their face. There is no conclusive proof of this though.

New Facebook features generally have a high Edge weight in order to promote the feature to users. For example, when Facebook Places rolled out, check-ins had a very high default weight for a few months and your newsfeed was probably inundated with stories like “John checked into Old Navy.” Generally, after a few weeks or months Facebook dials the new feature back to a more reasonable weight.

Time Decay

As a story gets older, it loses points because it’s “old news.”

EdgeRank is a running score–not a one-time score. When a user logs into Facebook, their newsfeed is populated with edges that have the highest score at that very moment in time. Your status update will only hit the newsfeed if it has a higher score–at that moment in time–than the other possible newsfeed stories.

Facebook is just multiplying the story by 1/x, where x is the time since the action happened. This may be a linear decay function, or it may be exponential–it’s not clear.

Additionally, Facebook seems to be adjusting this time-decay factor based on 1) how long since the user last logged into Facebook, and 2) how frequently the user logs into Facebook. It’s not clear how exactly this works, but my experiments have shown time-decay changes if I log into Facebook more.

How do I check my EdgeRank Score?

Anyone who claims to check your EdgeRank is lying to you. It is completely impossible.

You can measure the effects of EdgeRank by seeing how many people you reached. You can also measure how much engagement you got (which impacts EdgeRank) using a Facebook analytics tool.

But there is no “general EdgeRank score” because each fan has a different affinity score with the page.

Furthermore, Facebook keeps the algorithm a secret, and they’re constantly tweaking it. So the value of comments compared to likes is constantly changing.

Lastly, fan pages never appear in the newsfeed-stories by/about the pages show up. So I really don’t care about the EdgeRank score of the page, I only care about the EdgeRank score of the status update (which is affected by the EdgeRank score of the page).

There will never be a 3rd-party tool that can measure EdgeRank. Too much data is private–eg, if a fan leaves a comment on my page’s status update, I can’t know how tightly he’s connected to the other fans–and the more tightly he’s connected, the more his comment impacts the Affinity Score of the status update for the other fans.

How can I optimize my fan page for EdgeRank?

It’s hard to trick an algorithm into thinking that your content is interesting. It’s much easier to rewrite your content so your fans leave more likes and comments.

Take your stodgy press releases, and turn them into questions that compel your fans to engage.

Here’s some examples:

“Click ‘like’ if you’re excited that we just released our iPad app.”

“Fill-in-the-blank: All I want for Christmas is ___. Our latest Christmas special is X.”

“Yes/No: I brushed my teeth last night. We just announced a new brand of toothpaste.”

“On a scale of 1-10, I think Obama is a great president. Watch this video of our CEO shaking hands with Obama.”

All those likes and comments will increase the Affinity Score between each fan and your page, boosting how many fans see your status updates in their newsfeed.